


What Baking Can Do

by Evilicequeen19



Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: Baking, US Queens, Waitress the musical, abby mueller as Jane, baking fixes everything, jane is the mom friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 19:57:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20729909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilicequeen19/pseuds/Evilicequeen19
Summary: In which Jane falls in love with Waitress, and decides to see exactly how much baking can really do





	What Baking Can Do

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this with the US cast of queens in mind; mostly because of Abby (who plays Seymour) and Jessie (who played Jenna) being related, which was the whole inspiration for this fic. Hope you enjoy!!

Truth be told, and call it crazy if you must; Jane Seymour didn’t care much for musicals. She loved what she and the other queens did every night, but to her it didn’t feel like a show- they were legitimately telling people about their lives.

Doing it in song was just more fun.

If Jane was going to listen to music, she would put on pop or soft rock. She liked songs she could bounce along to without getting too invested in knowing what deeper meanings were going on.

She certainly had enough “deeper meanings” keeping things under control with the other queens. Maybe she was self important, but she secretly thought to herself that the queens’ current situation would have been far more volatile at the start without her. They all got on fabulously now, but Aragon’s ability to hold a grudge, Anne being Anne, Cleves’s “give it to you straight” personality, and Kat’s fragility had made things tenuous, and Jane liked to think that she had been the glue holding it all together.

The first time Jane heard the song that changed a big part of her personality was walking past Kat’s room. Unlike Jane, Kat adored musicals. She loved to get sucked into other people’s stories in any way possible, and the more whimsical the better. Kat could often be heard singing songs from Wicked, or Seussical, or any Disney musical.

That particular day however, the song streaming out of Kat’s partially open door was unfamiliar to Jane. She paused to listen for a moment.

…Then I’ll slice and serve my worries away, I can fix this, I can twist it into sugar butter covered pieces, never mind what’s underneath it…

Jane stood outside the door for the rest of the song. She finally understood a little why Kat loved musicals so much- she had been enraptured by the singer.

Jane knocked on Kat’s door using the beginning of the refrain from her show song, Heart of Stone. All the queens knocked on each other’s doors using their song; it was their way of letting each other know who was knocking. 

“Come in!” Kat shouted perkily. Jane stepped into Kat’s pink, white, and gold room. Kat’s phone was connected to a small speaker on her dresser, and Kat was seated in front of her big mirror. Her hair was done up show style despite it being fairly early, and Kat was carefully styling the bottom into ringlet curls with a curling iron.

“Hi Jane-y! What’s up?” She said cheerfully.

“Not much, I was just about to head out to the store. What musical is this that you’re listening to?” Jane asked.

Kat put her hair styler down and turned around to face Jane. “Oh, I just found this one! It’s called Waitress. I know I say this every time, but I really think you’d like this one.” She gushed. 

“You know, maybe I’ll give this one a listen Kat.” Jane said with a laugh. “Is that how you’re doing you’re hair for the show tonight?”

Kat nodded. The part of her hair already styled bounced merrily.

“It’s cute. You should do it like that more often.” Jane said with a smile. Kat beamed at her.

The show came and went without a hitch. Jane sighed and kicked her shoes off, glad to be in her room for the night. Jane loved her room- it was small but cozy, sandwiched between Kat’s room and the stairs leading up to Anne’s loft. She put on a pair of black and white flannel shorts and a white v neck shirt and sat on her bed with her head leaning against the wall nearest to Kat’s room. She rubbed her temples to alleviate her growing headache. Sometimes the show took a lot out of her. 

As she turned her head so the left side of it was leaning more heavily toward the wall, she heard Waitress leaking softly through the wall. She rolled over and got off the bed. Maybe instead of her usual decompression routine she could try something more fun.

Jane stepped into the hallway and knock her signature knock on Kat’s door before poking her head in.

“Shall we see what baking can do, then?” Jane said.

Kat smiled and stood up to join Jane in the kitchen.

As the weeks went by Jane began baking more regularly, often occasionally humming the melody for “What Baking Can Do”. That song became the most played song on her phone, and she developed a deep appreciation for Jessie Mueller, the original actress who played Jenna. Her baking skills were improving too; when she started she was mostly making cookies, but her repertoire had expanded to include cake, some pies, and banana bread.

Baking really and truly did help relax her. All of the queens had taken at least one turn in the kitchen with her, but none of them seemed to find it relaxing. Cleves and Aragon both found it to be too much work. Parr would leave used bowls and utensils around so there’d be a huge mess whenever she helped, or she’d get distracted and stop following the recipe. Anne liked eating better; Jane actually had to ban her from helping because of the time she ate more cookie dough than they ended up baking. Kat liked it best out of all of the queens, but Jane suspected that was because Kat knew what was behind Jane’s baking.

Emotions.

Jane was very good at being there for the rest of the queens but, aside from her moment in the show when she had to, she wasn’t very good at expressing her own emotions. Kat understood that with every cookie or cake Jane baked she was baking our sadness, frustration, anger, stress, you name it.

After a few more weeks Jane decided to do a little experiment. 

Jane kept a small calendar in the bottom drawer of her dresser. In that calendar she had marked each date that might trigger bad thoughts and feelings for each queen with their respective color, and made a special marking for death dates. She had learned the hard way that, whether they knew it was a “special” date in the past for them or not, her new family always reacted sourly when one of their dates came up. 

Jane wondered if they woke up to their favorite treat on a bad date, could it change the mood of her new family? 

Cathy was her first trial of her little experiment. Cathy was also the stickiest to deal with on her bad dates; Jane suspected she also kept a calendar somewhere. On Cathy’s bad dates she just wouldn’t leave her room for anything unless she was on to do the show- she didn’t want to see anyone. 

So when Jane woke up one morning and checked her calendar, she was dismayed to see a blue “H” written on it. Today was the day in their past lives that Cathy had married Henry, and Jane knew that meant she wouldn’t be seeing Cathy at all, with it being a no show day.

Jane went to the store and bought all the ingredients to make one of Cathy’s favorite treats. She explained away Cathy’s absence to the other queens by saying Cathy was feeling run down and needed an alone day to recharge. She left a plate of the dinner Cleves had made outside Cathy’s room, as she always did when Cathy shut herself away like this. 

After dinner Jane set to work.

Just before Jane to bed she set a plate with a small crème brûlée on it in front of Cathy’s door, along with a note that said ‘You’ve taken back control, I hope you know’ in her large, loopy scrawl. She knocked on the door with her special knock sequence, then went across the hall to her room.

Five minutes later Jane heard five sharp raps on her door. She was surprised- that was Cathy’s knock. She opened the door to find Cathy on the verge of tears. Jane opened her arms for a hug and Cathy flew into them immediately. Jane held her tightly as Cathy sobbed quietly. 

“You knew.” Cathy said. Her voice was muffled.

“Yes,” Jane answered softly.

Cathy stepped out from the hug and wiped a last tear away. She gave Jane a small smile.

“Thanks.” She said just as softly. Then she turned and fled back to her room.

Jane smiled. “Any time.” She whispered, though no one was in the hallway to hear.

Next was Cleves. If Cathy was on the hard side of the spectrum of handling on bad dates, then Cleves was easy mode. Cleves was already the most likely of all the queens to tell you exactly what was on her mind; on her bad dates she was just slightly quicker to snap or had a bit more bite and snark to her comments than usual. 

Cleves was also the earliest riser of all the queens; Cleves loved to run and almost always started her mornings with a long jog. So Jane when Jane checked her calendar a little while after her success with Cathy and noticed Cleves’s divorce date was the next day, she decided to plan accordingly.

The next day Jane came downstairs in the morning to Anne and Cleves chatting surprising amicably.

“You’re in a good mood today, aren’t you Anna? Have a good run this morning?” Anne asked.

“Well yes, but it’s hard to be grumpy when you wake up to find a German Chocolate cake in the fridge with your name on it.” Cleves said. She turned to Jane and gave her a wink. Jane smiled back at her.

“What? Jane, you made cake last night? Why didn’t you say anything?” Anne whined, whipping around to face Jane. 

“I made the cake for Anna, love. It was a mini one.” Jane said.

“And it was delicious. You get better with every cake.” Cleves added.

Jane smiled again. It was the nicest Cleves had been on a bad date.

She was two for two.

“Jane?”

Jane set aside the book she had been reading. She had been waiting for Kat to come talk to her for about an hour. This morning her calendar check had met her with a pink X- Kat’s death date.

“What is it, love?” Jane asked kindly, though she knew what Kat would say.

“I’m sad today Jane.” Kat said. She sounded confused. Jane knew Kat didn’t keep track of her past life dates, but she often came to Jane or Anne to ask to spend the day with them on her bad dates.

“Why don’t you come to the kitchen with me?” Jane suggested. “I’m pretty sure we have all the ingredients for lemon meringue pie.” Jane actually knew they did; she’d made sure of it yesterday.

She and Kat spent most of the early afternoon making the pie. After a bit Anne joined them, and she and Kat made an enormous mess preparing the meringue together. Usually Jane had a rule about chaos- and Anne- in the kitchen while she was baking, but today she let it slide. Kat was laughing and that’s what mattered.

Miraculously, the pie turned out well. Kat made sure every queen had a slice.

Aragon’s favorite treat was simple and classic, but delicious none the less. Aragon loved black and white cookies. 

On bad Aragon days Aragon acted like her new life with the rest of the queens had just started again. She would pick fights left and right, rile up Anne, and even Cathy, who was usually Switzerland in terms of queen conflict, was not immune to Aragon’s jabs. 

On Aragon’s divorce day, she woke up feeling like a thundercloud. She was ready to snap at the first person she saw; she had to get it out of her system somehow. She swung open her door, hoping to see Anne or Cleves in the living room.

Instead, she saw a bag of her favorite treats hanging eye level, suspended from a string attached to the top of her doorframe. She grabbed the bag and pulled the string free, and with the string fell a note. Aragon picked it up.

‘There’s no way you’ll find all the bags of these in the house!” Read the note. Aragon smirked. She recognized Jane’s handwriting, and Jane knew she loved a challenge.

“Okay Jane. You’re on.” Aragon said to herself. 

There was not a fight to be had in the queens house that day, as Jane and the other queens watched in delight while Aragon completed her cookie scavenger hunt. Kat, Anne and Cleves even ended up looking with Aragon for the elusive last bag (hiding up above the cupboard that held the laundry supplies) while Cathy and Jane watched in amusement.

Jane was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on her latest and most difficult to date baking endeavor when Anne came crashing into the house. Jane knew that Cathy called Anne “Hurricane” for a reason, but that reason was especially obvious on Anne’s bad dates. Anne tended not to take her feelings out on people for the most part, but she slammed and banged to her hearts content.

Jane heard Anne stomping into the kitchen. She’d finished her surprise for Anne just in time. She learned and labored over a French dessert just for this moment. She knew today, Anne’s anniversary of leaving France to come to England, Anne would love a reminder of home. She’d made her macaroons, which were wildly difficult. She’d even made them chocolate with mint filling, so they’d be green and black. 

Jane finished stacking the macaroons on a small plate and was just putting it on the counter when the slamming of Anne’s bag announced her presence in the kitchen. But when Anne saw the plate waiting for her, all the noise stopped. 

“Are those…” Anne stopped talking mid-sentence and gave Jane a searching look.

“All yours.” Said Jane simply. She knew to keep things short and sweet with Anne when she was her in hurricane mode.

Anne looked down at the plate sharply. She traced her finger over one of the little cookies. Then she picked up the plate carefully.

“Well, thanks then.” She said brusquely. She swept out of the kitchen.

Jane noticed she went up both sets of stairs to her loft without making a sound.

Jane usually ignored her bad dates. She always found if she went on with her day as normal she would eventually forget it was one of her dates at all.

Her one exception was Edward’s birthday.

Technically it was also her death date, but Edward’s birthday overshadowed it in her mind. It pained her to think how many of those she’d missed when she died. Now that she’d been given another chance at life, she was going to honor him in any way she could on his birthday. And this year she wanted to bake him something. 

In the week leading up to it, Jane racked her brain for the perfect thing to bake. But since she’d died before she’d known Edward, she had no idea what he might have liked. She feel into a gloom the day before his birthday. She had no ingredients, no plan. She went through the motions at the show that night- something she hated doing- and eventually feel into a fitful sleep.

The next morning Jane awoke with a pit in her stomach. She felt she’d failed herself and failed Edward; she still had no idea what to bake to honor him. Slowly she got dressed and went down to the kitchen.

The other queens, her family, were all standing in the kitchen waiting for her. There was a bag of flour, bowls and whisks on the counter, butter was softening next to their fridge, and the oven was preheating. Cathy was holding a recipe in her hand.

“Um,” said Anne. She was looking down and dragging the toe of one of her shoes across the ground. She tried again.

“Um, we know you’ve been looking for something to bake today. And you’ve cheered us all up so much with your baking for us…” Anne trailed off, looking up at Jane.

“We would have made it for you, but I told them that the action of baking is often better than the baked good for you.” Said Kat, much more loudly than Anne.

“Anything you want us to help with you just say the word.” Said Cleves. Aragon nodded fiercely in agreement.

Cathy held out the recipe for Jane to see wordlessly. Jane took it.

It was a recipe for angel food cake.

“He really was an angel.” Cathy said. “Had to have gotten it from you.”

Jane’s eyes began to well up. It was all so perfect. 

“How can I begin to thank you?” Jane said through her tears.

Aragon smiled. She had begun to cry as well. “Jane, this is us thanking you.” She said warmly. “So what do you say? Want to be out fearless baking leader?”

Jane sniffled, gave a small smile, and picked up the whisk.


End file.
